Philosophy (Witt) and Communications (Lillie)

A certain passage in Aristotle’s Metaphysics stood out to me. In the beginning of Book XII, he starts by talking about substance, and how there are three types of it. The reason this caught my attention is because when I think of the word substance, I do not think too much of it, as I find it to be a pretty simple word. Likewise, he talks about the three types of substance in a way that I would’ve never expected. The three types he talks about are natural, unmoved, and in motion.

Aristotle goes into great depth when talking about the third type of substance. He says how there is an everlasting unmoved substance. To back this up, Aristotle explains that substances are primary beings and that if substances are perishable , than everything is perishable. Despite this, he says that motion “can’t come to be or perish”. I’m not entirely sure what Aristotle is saying here. To me, it sounds like he’s saying that motion can not perish because it already is perished, but that doesn’t make to much sense to me.

The reason that this passage caught my attention is because I saw something in the reading that I initially thought would be an easy concept to grasp, but after reading it over and giving it more thought, I realized that it isn’t as simple as I thought.